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Comment by superkuh | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, it's entirely built on the idea that every transaction is known by everyone. I think Lance is a bit confused. Maybe he should look into Monero.

The point of Bitcoin is to enable anyone to exchange value with anyone. And it does that very well. When the US justice department declared that credit card companies had to stop processing donations to wikileaks I could still donate through bitcoin.

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I don't think they're confused, I think the vast majority of people involved in crypto or who are spectators of crypto are confused. I have repeatedly heard that crypto enables "anonymous" transactions for years.

Also he literally links the original paper, quoting the part where it talks about transactions being harder to trace. "without telling who the parties are".

The "without telling who the parties are" is more about non-personal identifiers. Similar to how knowing your IP address doesn't really identify you by itself, you need to go through (often several levels of) other parties to get that info. Which in addition is ephemeral, others will be assigned your IP and tracing which requests were made by you vs. someone else is a lot harder than tracing a credit-card.

This seems to be lost on a lot of folks, which I find strange in a tech-centric forum. Bitcoin is perfectly pseudonymous, as it strives to be, and not anonymous, which it has never attempted to be.

The Bitcoin designers did not pretend it was anonymous – it’s obviously not to anyone who looks at the architecture! - but the people selling Bitcoin have loudly lied about this since the beginning, however. If you search here you’ll find like 14 years of people pointing out that it’s easily traced and getting a bunch of word salad from the sales guys in response.

My recollection is that Satoshi wanted people to rotate public keys after every use exactly to have anonymity.

And some wallets do this automatically. But if you send a transaction and the change flows directly from your previous wallet to your next wallet, you're not accomplishing much.

That's still not anonymity; it's just pseudonymity with more masks.

Well, "crypto" does allow that--and has for years!--using zero-knowledge proofs (as in Zcash), at least within some bounds (that I would say are quite reasonable for conversational purposes... hell: someone in the government seems to think this stuff works, hence the sanctions on Tornado Cash); Bitcoin, one very specific technology from crypto, however, does not.

This is the only informed comment in the entire thread.

I came here hoping for an interesting discussion about Monero, ZCash, Tornado Cash on Ethereum, and Halo/ZK proofs. Disappointing!

Of course, all of that is true. I'm only saying that people seem to believe it is inherent to crypto.

> When the US justice department declared that credit card companies had to stop processing donations to wikileaks I could still donate through bitcoin.

If any appreciable amount of money was sent this way you would see blacklisting of bitcoin addresses where sending / receiving money from that address would get you in legal trouble. Bitcoin creates a situation where you cannot be physically prevented from sending the money but everyone including the gov’t will know you did it so it’s so it’s not censorship resistant to any gov’t that cares to get a wrench.

Right. It calls their bluff and makes them actually present a case in a court of law. There are no regulations or laws involved when the DOJ tells payment processors to blacklist journalists they don't like and the payment processors are happy to comply without it.

Ask anyone outside your tech circle to explain Bitcoin and it will be something like "It's an anonymous digital currency that can't be traced, unlike bank accounts."

Don't tell him about Monero bruuuh :D

What about zec beam grin

Don't tell the crypto Bruhs about the several vulnerabilities already found in the Monero anonnymisation system.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1704.04299/

The problem is also one of credibility, Bitcoin was supposed to be private and breaching privacy has proved to be pretty trivial. Encryption is hard, but maintaining anonymity is much harder.

Theory vs. practice. When there's a DoJ case with a web that's all unified through Monero, then you have proof Monero has been busted. Monero hasn't been busted.

From the paper - "Our techniques show that Monero is not necessarily a dead end for investigators."

And then offers zero evidence to demonstrate that investigators were able to use anything from the seizures.

This is not evidence - "They (mistakenly?) advised their hopeful subscribers to publish their email addresses (hexencoded, but publicly visible) in the Monero blockchain, leading to these transactions being identified" [31]

[31] - https://steemit.com/shadowbrokers/@wh1sks/ theshadowbrokers-may-have-received-up-to-1500-monerousd66-000-from-their-june-monthly-dump-service

Link is broken - where is the evidence that 1500 XMR was transacted?

Guessing your point is that a promise of anonymity is not equal proof of it. As you also likely know, at least one response to that paper was posted:

https://www.getmonero.org/2018/03/29/response-to-an-empirica...

That paper is from 2018. I expect they've been remediated by now, though everything is going to be vulnerable at some point in some way. What matters is for how long.

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